In today's microelectronics test environment, there is always increasing focus on reducing test time and cost as well as increasing throughput at both the wafer level and module level test. One of the areas of test that has recently become more popular in addressing these concerns is that of testing multiple devices in parallel (hereinafter referred to as “multi-DUT testing”). The idea with multi-DUT testing is that during the test for a single device, the tester you are using may have unused pins just sitting there idle. With multi-DUT testing these unused pins are programmed to test one or more identical devices in parallel with the original device being tested. Multi-DUT testing can drastically reduce test time and cost, while significantly increasing throughput of the existing installed tester base.
This is all well and good, but multi-DUT testing is not without problems. Many challenges exist in implementing multi-DUT testing for a particular device into a manufacturing environment. Below is a list of the challenges involved:                1. Generating a multi-DUT program is an error prone, manually intensive and time consuming task which generally can be justified only for high volume parts.        
2. Fairly complex issues arise for multi-DUT testing with regards to test execution flow and datalogging.
3. Generally, automated test equipment (hereinafter referred to as “ATE”) vendors do not provide multi-DUT hardware or software support. The ones that do, many times impose various limitations with their solution which prevent their support from being a viable alternative. Limitations include such things as restricting pin allocations for each of the multiple devices to certain banks of pins. Also, limitations on the structure of the tests, serial or parallel execution of tests, as well as robust test program flow can severely hinder the use of an ATE solution. In the “real world” of test, flexibility and tester programmability are extremely important.
As a result of these problems, multi-DUT cannot be realized in many cases due to the cost of implementation as well as restrictions imposed by the ATE hardware/software. Hence, the need for this invention.